“For what it’s worth,” he says, his voice apologetic, “I loved being with you…like that.”
Tears threaten to blind me, and I swallow a huge lump in my throat. “Goodnight, Aidan,” I mutter without looking at him.
“Goodnight.”
Chapter Twelve
Aidan
I know that I love you.
I keep hearing the words as if she’s living inside my head.
It was tempting, so tempting, the possibility of letting go and allowing myself to enjoy what she was so willingly offering, but I couldn’t, because she had no idea what she was asking.
“You don’t even know me, Liz,” I mutter to myself.
I’ve spent the last two days alone in my tiny cabin upstate, walking, running, and sometimes just doing nothing. I learned to clear my mind and detach from everything a long time ago, to deal with my memories, but now, it doesn’t work.
I can’t stop thinking about Liz.
She’s young, talented and beautiful. She has a world of possibilities ahead of her. The last thing she needs is me.
I know that I love you.
She’s wrong, and her certainty is proof of how young she is.
You’re barely four years older, Aidan.
But I’ve lived a different life. I wasn’t sheltered by a doting father. I watched my mother die in a horrible accident and spent the next decade in therapy.
Hey, Liz. How would you feel about me if you knew I killed my father?
Would you still love me then?
Pain claws through me when I remember that winter almost ten years ago, when I finally lashed out at my father. My mother was leaving him when she had the accident, convinced he was having an affair. Landon and I survived, she didn’t. My dad never recovered from her death, and he secluded himself in the house, barely acknowledging that Landon and I even existed.
I blamed him too, for everything, even as I longed for him to be the father I needed, the one I barely remembered, the man Landon sometimes described from his memories.
When I confronted him that winter night, I’m not sure what I expected. I said all the hateful things I’d thought about him for years, and then in the morning he was dead. I’d provided the final crack to a man who was already irreparably broken. When he walked out into the cold that night, he had no intention of coming back alive.
Because of me.
There’s a whole ocean of blackness threatening to drown me if I let it. I’ve fallen into that darkness before, after my father’s death. I drank. I left home and ended up in the basement of an abandoned church with a bunch of other teenage runaways, getting high, and hating myself when the highs didn’t last long enough to make me forget.
And then one day, there was Landon, so out of place in that dark basement, he might as well have been a god. I thought he was my dad, come to take me to wherever he’d found his peace.
I spent the next year in rehab, with more therapy, and through it all, Landon was there. Working hard rebuilding the hotels and working just as hard rebuilding me. He even tried to save the other runaways by getting involved in the Shelter Project, a charity that helped the kids who didn’t have a billionaire for a big brother.
I’m a fraud, Liz. A resentful little murderer who’s only where I am because I have a brother who will always move the earth to fix me even though I killed our father.
I get to survive, to be admired for my looks and talent, because of luck, and family I don’t deserve.
Just like I don’t deserve Liz.
She’s so beautiful, so young. What does she know about mistakes you can never take back? There’s no way I can bear to let her see who I am under the persona of the talented Aidan Court.
I’m not anyone’s fairytale prince.